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Student handbooks contain all the policies, rules, and regulations that outline expectations for everyone at your school. However, they’re often notoriously dry documents that can be dismissed by folks not paying attention. Sure, you can send home a “contract” stating that the student (and his or her parents) have read the handbook and will abide by the policies, but that’s hardly a guarantee of painstaking attention to every detail.

So for our September 2016 issue of The Source for Academic Leadership, let’s take a moment or two to discuss your school’s plan for policy dissemination to your students.

For a comprehensive approach to the faculty hiring process, include the advising role you require of your middle- and upper-school teachers. Your advisory program and advising role(s) should be not merely included but also highlighted in the process. Candidates should walk away from their campus visits with a clear sense of the role, some understanding of how it supports school mission, and, ideally, some enthusiasm for taking it on. Failure to inform (even inspire) prospective teachers in this way implicitly undermines, from the outset, a sense that the role is taken seriously at your school.

Professional development for teachers is often scheduled at this time of year, with the idea that since class is out, teachers have more time to devote to educational intensives. That’s not always the case—67% of teachers in New Jersey had some form of summer gig in 2015, according to one informal survey, and only a third of teachers reserve time from second jobs and family obligations for ongoing education.

With that in mind, we rounded up this list of creative, low-stress—and flexible—professional development ideas to pass to your teachers to keep their minds sharp and their spirits high for the Fall 2016 semester.

We hope your summer is as sunny and joyous as it has been here at the ISM headquarters, where we’re in the middle of hosting our Summer Institute workshop series in Wilmington, Delaware. Even if you haven’t been able to join in the professional development opportunities with your peers, we don’t want you to let this relatively calm period of the school year slip past without investing in yourself. So, we asked our Consultants to assemble this list of go-to books, and here’s what they recommend.

The United States presidential election has certainly heated up in the last month, and it doesn’t seem to be calming down any time soon. Chances are, the current political climate will still be as hot a topic in August as it is now. Considering how inflammatory rhetoric can seep into classrooms, we thought it best to take a moment to prepare for potentially difficult conversations with students without taking advantage of young minds’ malleability to leverage personal political opinions.

Last issue, we discussed public service announcements (PSAs) that were ineffective by modern standards for various reasons, including unclear calls-to-action and inaccurate scare tactics that irreverent teenagers were more likely to mock than to heed. Therefore, we thought we’d take some time in this issue to talk about the ways in which schools can help their student body achieve change.